UHS Sending 16 To State In Forensics

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Anybody who has heard of Speech and Debate will know what Forensics is.

“I always explain Forensics as competitive speech,” said Ulysses High School Forensics coach Matt Green, who has worked for USD214 for 10 years and has coached Forensics for two years. “It’s a mostly individual event where you do one of four things. There’s 11 different events total (but) I kind of group them into four different things.”

There are some events where the student reads poetry or prose in a dramatic fashion or a funny way where judges look for students who read it the best and engage the judges the most; another section is acting where the student memorizes a script or a story and act it out, usually solo, but there is a section for duets.

“There’s another grouping where you create a speech to perform for other people,” Green said. “There’s informative, where you’re telling about a subject of your choice, and then there’s also original oration, which is persuasive speech.”

Three events include Improvisation. Improptu is where students are given a subject five minutes before they’re supposed to speak about it.

“There’s one called Extempt, where you’re given a political topic or something in the news and you have to do research and you have 30 minutes to make a speech out of it,” Green said. “And then there’s one called IDA where you and a partner are given two characters, a location and an activity and you have to create an entire scene out of it in 30 minutes.”

Judges listen and, based on their own objective criteria – some things in the rules – and decide who wins.”

Fifteen students are heading to State Championships and one is going to State Festival out of 18 kids on the team. Last school year, UHS only had 11 on the team.

“We only had eight entries go to state,” Green said. “This year we technically had 22 possible entries; I could only bring 16 to state.”

One student did not qualify for state champs, but will be attending state festival.

“If you don’t finish first or second, you can go and kind of get a rating on your event,” Green added. “She’s a freshman, so she’s going to learn a lot from the experience.”

Green said he was asked to take over the Forensics program, but did not know what he was getting into.

“I do have some speech and drama background, but I had no idea what Forensics was before I took it over,” Green said.

How does it feel taking so many to state in just a short time?

“It feels really good, my kids have worked really hard this year,” Green said. “A big thing with Forensics is recruiting new members; the more people you have, the better you do, usually.”

The numbers went up this year, but Green will lose nine seniors from the Class of 2025.

“I feel confident, I’ve already talked to some people about joining next year,” said Green, who added that he works at Kepley Middle School aside from one hour at UHS. “I feel good about talking to middle schoolers (about joining the team when they get to UHS).”

The team won GWAC for the first time since at least 2011.

“The previous coach, Misti Becker, has been a big help to me,” Green said. “She’s been with me the entire way, helping me out. She set the tone for a lot of these seniors, and I’ve been lucky enough to build on that. She was a big part of helping get us to the point where we are now.”

State will be May 3 at Washburn University in Topeka.

See who all is going to compete at the State level, page 15 in today's edition.